Politics & Power Quote by George Soros

Soros is selling an audacious idea in deceptively bland packaging: global governance not as elite imposition, but as an export of domestic consent. The opening hedge, "To my mind", signals the veteran operator who knows how controversial this is, then immediately reaches for democracy as both shield and engine. In his framing, international institutions become an extension of the ballot box rather than a rival to it. That move is strategic: it recasts "internationalism" from technocratic overreach into something like municipal plumbing, built by elected governments because voters asked for it.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the familiar populist charge that supranational bodies are unaccountable. Soros concedes the legitimacy test upfront ("subject to the will of the people") and then flips it: if people really are sovereign, they can choose constraints on themselves, including treaties, courts, and cross-border regulators. It's democracy as a permission slip for binding ourselves to rules we can't break the moment politics gets inconvenient.

Context matters because Soros isn't an abstract political theorist; he's a financier-philanthropist long cast as the face of borderless elites. This sentence reads like reputational judo. It insists that the pipeline to global institutions runs through democratic states, not around them. The quiet premise is also the most combustible one: that public will can be cultivated. "If the people will it" sounds neutral, but it hints at the soft power ecosystem Soros helped build - civil society, media, NGOs - that can manufacture the conditions under which "the people" come to will exactly that.